The Final Confession of Mabel Stark
The fictionalized biography by Robert Hough is the basis of the upcoming movie being made by Tailor Made Films.

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Robert Hough

When he writes, he moans, he yells, he thwacks the keyboard. It took a whole group of physical therapists to fix his neck after his first novel

Saturday, June 30, 2001

Rebecca Caldwell

I've always written fiction but primarily made my living writing for magazines. I tend toward things that have strong storylines with bold characters. The everyday is something I'm not too interested in. Some writers really like it, they'll train their light on some quotidian relationship or event and just poke it and poke it until it becomes something else. That's fine, but it's not what I'm into. I like really big, shrieky stories that hopefully will make your jaw drop.

I'll get ideas just goofing around with friends. A lot of times, I'll be mouthing off about something and think, "Hey, that would make a good book." Then I'll get home and sober up and realize, "No it wouldn't, that was just fatuousness." I don't know where ideas come from. Knowing where good ideas come from is the hardest thing.

The idea for [The Final Confession of Mabel Stark]started when I was doing a profile on a lion trainer for Equinox. He gave me a book on the history of famous big-cat trainers, and there were a couple of pages on this person Mabel Stark. And she had this incredible life story: orphan turned nurse turned mental-house-inmate turned stripper turned tiger-trainer.

I used to like to get up around 9:30 or 10 a.m. and start writing even before I was fully awake. But things changed quite considerably after we had kids. When I was writing Mabel, typically I'd get up and feed my kids, since I'm on breakfast detail. They'd go off around 9, and I'd write to around 12. Then I'd have lunch with the kids. Then they'd get put down for their naps, and I'd spend the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out what I was going to have happen tomorrow.

Mabel was written very quickly after I'd done the research and I worked pretty hard to get that eccentric voice that she has -- that took a lot of trial and error. But once I did that, the book started coming ridiculously fast, like 4,000 or 5,000 words a day. I wrote a huge whack of it in eight months, working seven days a week. I would usually just start writing. I don't tend to come up with ideas when my fingers aren't moving.

While writing the book, I was playing with my neighbours' big, grumpy cat -- poking at him, just bugging him -- and he turned around and gave me a pretty nasty swipe. He opened up this huge cut, and I had to get it bandaged and I was supposed to watch for rabies. And I remember thinking, this is a 12-pound house cat. There's a violence here. It's just pure masochism to confront a cage full of big Bengal tigers who have not been neutered and have their claws.

At one point, I hurt my neck really badly. I had my computer screen down low, and when I'm typing, I'll get frantic and I kind of moan and yell and talk to myself really loudly. My whole body clenches up and you can hear me smacking the keyboard all through the house -- that's why my wife likes to take the kids out when I'm working. There was just too much muscle strain and something gave in my neck.

My doctor put me on all these muscle relaxants and I went to two physiotherapists and four massage therapists, and finally, the last one made a good dent in my neck. It was a big issue dealing with the neck pain Mabel had given me. I've moved the screen up, and next time I'll take the weekends off.

I have a zillion favourite authors. Two I've just discovered are Mark Helprin, who wrote A Soldier of the Great War, and James Carlos Blake, who wrote Red Grass River and In the Rogue Blood. I like books about scoundrels and grifters and outlaws, and he does it better than anyone. I also thought Zadie Smith's White Teeth was really good. Right now, I'm reading The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie. I think a lot of people forget that he is a really astounding writer. A lot of people know him because of the The Satanic Verses, which is a really dense book, but The Moor's Last Sigh is really funny and every character is really weird in some kind of way and the sentences are just full of witty references and they just roll around in your mouth. He's my kind of writer.

With Mabel,I did read a lot of my favourite novels that had a lot of characters looking back on their lives. Little Big Man helped a lot. Most of these books that tell someone's life in its entirety, it's someone else telling the story of that life. Like Cloudsplitter, it's not Cloudsplitter telling the story, but his son. Or in Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All -- it's his story, but it's his widow talking about him. But I knew Mabel was going to be first person, and of all the novels of people looking back, only Little Big Man was told from that perspective.

Writing from the perspective of an 80-year-old female Kentuckian who spent all her life tiger-training was very difficult. There were a lot of almost acting exercises involved at the beginning. There were periods when I thought I couldn't do it. But it got easier and towards the end, it was automatic. But there was nothing romantic to get through it, it was just work.

Most advice to writers is always sort of stupid, I think. The only people who are writers are people who cannot stop themselves from doing it. It's a difficult thing to pull off and those people are going to do it no matter what. If they get good at it, bully for them. But keep in mind: Write what you want to write and then show it to people. Then take it on the chin when they tell you it's lousy.

Perseverance is good.

Robert Hough's first novel, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, was released in May by Random House.

He spoke to Rebecca Caldwell